The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims [Hardcover]

Robert J. Stove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

Denis Boyles examines the internal crises that have changed the personality of what was once La Belle France, transforming it into a nation afflicted with status anxiety. Vile France is a work that will gratify Francophobes everywhere and cause even the most committed defender of the Jacques Chirac worldview to crack an occasional smile.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his analysis of five eras in which "secret policing has been of vital importance to government," Australian writer Stove (Prince of Music) sheds new light on the intrigues of the major "spymasters" for Queen Elizabeth I; explicates the "genius for anticipating 20th-century dictatorships' methods" of the obscure Joseph Fouché, influential police minister to Napoleon; explores the roots of the former Soviet Union's 20th-century spy apparatus in the 16th-century cutthroat Oprichina; and reviews the "relentlessly conspiratorial habits of mind" in Hitler's "Reich Security Main Office." His argument for undertaking such a project: that governments don't want us to think about domestic surveillance and historians have failed to write about it. A long and sympathetic chapter on the career of controversial FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover is undercut by cheap shots at Franklin D. Roosevelt ("Fifty year's glutinous hagiography has failed to detect in FDR any principle whatsoever"), though, and other low blows (Martin Luther King Jr. "has become the opiate of post-Christian America's masses") mar its pages. Stove spends pages condemning rumors about Hoover's homosexuality-at the same time that he off-handedly repeats slanders against liberal hero Adlai Stevenson-while dismissing in a paragraph the harm of Hoover-instigated spy operations directed at American citizens. Stove's subject is worthy, but his objectivity is questionable.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 318 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189355466X
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554665
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #361,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A colorful read, June 25, 2003

By 

James W Franklin (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (Hardcover)

This is a colorful run through the history of the main secret police forces that have preyed on their own citizens. The color in question is red - Stove gives us plenty of blood on the walls of torture chambers. Rightly so - that is what a state run by and for its secret police is all about.

7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Clue About Secret Policing?!, May 20, 2003

By 

John G. Cakars - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (Hardcover)

I looked forward to reading this book as the title caught my eye. Secret police topics are a favorite of mine. The author says in the foreword that "secret policing -- that is, governments' surveillance of their own subjects, as distint from espionage, which concentrates on governments' surveillance of others' subjects -- remains a topic about which almost everybody knows a little and almost nobody knows a lot." So domestic surveillance is what the author writes about.

The author explained why five examples are given. The first example of Queen Elizabeth I's surveillance was interesting, but dry and boring. I could not get too excited about that chapter. Here is a clue about the book. Read the foreword and afterword and the review on this site. You will basically know what book contains. Yes, each chapter goes into more detail. But I was unsatisfied with the treatment. The reader is basically told who is arrested by the NKVD or Gestapo -- mostly the "big" names like Bukharin or Admiral Canaris. The book does discuss some of the things that could get the ordinary individual in trouble. I guess I was looking for the experience of "dread" and "fear" that secret policing could induce.

The author, in the foreword, quotes Lenin "'Who whom?' Who gets to arrest, torture, imprison, whom? Who ends up sentencing whom to death?" I am not entirely convinced that the author answered this question.

This book has notes. The notes are in the back of the book. The notes are not numbered. They are listed by page. The bibliography is arranged by chapter.

The author claims that there is a dearth of book about "secret policing." If that is true, then I look forward to the next author who tries to tackle this subject.

6 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Shame about the middle bits, July 2, 2003

By 

Andrew Davison (Perth, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (Hardcover)

I agree with another reviewer on this site: the introduction and summary are the best bits. Mr Stove has an annoying habit of letting his personal politics interfere with the story. This does not come through too badly in the earlier pieces, but his right-wing views become obvious when discussing the 20th century and unnecessarily so.
It is a fascinating topic. I would love to read a better book about it.